The Sadness of Watching a Woody Allen Movie

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A new Woody Allen film is out today, Magic in the Moonlight, a title so bland and content-less that it alone is an insult to its audience. And the annual crisis familiar to all of Woody Allen's reluctant fans approaches: to see or not to see it? It was not so long ago, even as late as Deconstructing Harry, that it wouldn't have been a question. Now whether any of Woody Allen's annual sacrifices to his muse is watchable is a one-in-three chance. Much worse, really, is that the good pictures, like last year's Blue Jasmine, are utterly frozen in time, cud that has passed through at least four stomachs. Allen appears to work randomly, simply taking whatever comes to hand, but even the best of his later material seems like a semi-conscious attempt to ruin the legacy that Allen's earlier work provided, to self-parody it, to flatten it, to lessen it.

I wonder if anyone younger than me can really recognize what Allen once meant. Obviously, his classics remain classics. His influence on comedy is without comparison. But by now it has all been distorted through the various prisms of his "personal problems," and the ludicrous celebrity he has been coated with. The change runs deeper, as well. Because the Woody Allen of today is so much more willfully stupid than he used to be. When I was growing up, there was a profound comfort in the existence of Woody Allen. He made it okay to be bookish. Films like Annie Hall and Manhattan offered incredibly rare instances of intellectual life seen on film. Allen, and as important, the women he dated, read. They read books. Not only did they read books, they read heavy books and talked about them before, during, and after having sex. They made in-jokes about the works of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. They assumed that everybody worth talking to would know who Marshall McLuhan was. Or Susan Sontag. Or Federico Fellini.

That's gone now. Not that Woody Allen has stopped making intellectual references. It wouldn't properly be a Woody Allen film without a reference to the Jazz Age or Freud. But the allusions, like everything Allen does now, feel hollow, routine, like the indulgence of a memory from his youth when he still had real feelings and innocent emotions. The references all remain the same, what was on the syllabus in some New York liberal college in 1963. Even Blue Jasmine was more or less a rewrite of A Streetcar Named Desire, which I assume Allen read as a teenager more than fifty years ago. Painting for Allen has become the Impressionists. Novels are Tolstoy. His culture has devolved from highly original, often obscure references to the kind of thing you find on mugs in suburban homes after a trip to Europe.

Allen has, in a way, just followed a general trend. The once real distinction between high and low culture long ago disappeared, and critics now cheerfully revel in their democratic tendencies by never admitting to having guilty pleasures, since no cultural pleasure can be guilty. In many ways, this is an entirely healthy development. Reading shouldn't be like eating steamed broccoli. But on the other hand, the trend has only gone one way. Highbrow has gone high-low. But lowbrow stays low. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek is quite happy to write about zombie movies. But zombie movies don't care about Slavoj Žižek.

Woody Allen, like the rest of pop culture, stopped reading in about 1984. The first hint was in the title of Deconstructing Harry. When I first went to see that film, I was excited. I thought that Woody Allen might actually have read Jacques Derrida, the major figure of deconstruction. I thought he might make a passing remark about Structure, Sign, and Play or "The Ends of Man." There is something funny, after all, about Derrida, an Algerian Jew obsessed with a Nazi-loving professor living in the Black Forest. But of course Allen hadn't read Derrida. Who was I kidding? "Deconstructing" to him was something he had read about in The New York Times, and he thought it was exactly the same as Freudian psychoanalysis. I am left with a pang of what might have been: What if Woody Allen could make references to Agamben? What kind of jokes would he write about Jonathan Franzen?

Allen was a symbol of the possibilities of an intellectual yet fulfilling life — a life that was full of study but also sex and humor. It's a sign of how powerful that vision of life was that his failure to maintain it has left me with this strange, entirely inappropriate, sense of betrayal. Magic in the Moonlight will no doubt enhance that feeling for a couple of hours.

It's been noted here and elsewhere that Allen's personal crises have made watching his films a squeamish business. The allegations that he sexually abused his adoptive daughter have risen and apparently fallen, but they linger nonetheless. The love affair in Magic in the Moonlight is between Colin Firth and Emma Stone, who is 28 years younger. And this adds to the list of films with creepily age-separated couples in Allen's films. But that particular pattern is certainly inconclusive. I don't know what happened between Allen and Dylan Farrow, and neither do you. Nobody does.

The drama of those allegations, however, has obscured the more general creative collapse of a genius. Whenever I see one of his new films, it reminds me of that scene in Abel Ferrara's King of New York, in which the gangster Frank White asks his henchman why he didn't come visit Frank in prison. And the henchman answers: "Who wanted to see you in a cage, man?" That's exactly how I feel about Allen. I don't know what cages he has built for himself, but that is how all his movies seem to me: The animal may be the same, but now it's behind bars. It can't hurt us. It can't touch us either.